


By Daily Dying I Have Come To Be

by Raynidreams



Category: Wolverine (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Child Abuse, Fix-It, Gen, Imprisonment, Parent-Child Relationship, Physical Abuse, Psychological Torture, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 10:05:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10242212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: The scientists at Transigen have more than the children imprisoned.





	

The woman woke up slowly. Her eyelashes fluttered, she took several even breaths from between cracked lips, and then her eyelids lifted. Harsh light stabbed her eyes. She blinked and moved a hand to shade them, and felt something encircled around her wrist catch. A hospital bracelet. The words printed on it blurred in and out. Her date of birth, her birth name, plus the name she'd chosen for herself. The luminescence of the overheads bobbed behind it and their imprint at the back of her retinas inverted, turning black. The confusion regarding the significance of the bracelet receded due to her growing list of other priorities. She coughed and tried to speak, but couldn’t. There wasn’t enough moisture left in her mouth to begin. 

She ran a thick tongue over her lower lip, listening to the lethargic padding of her heart for several minutes.

She also needed to piss.

Against the rising tide of dizziness, she rolled onto her front, and from there, each movement heavy, got her hands under knees and her feet flat on the cool concrete floor before consciously thinking that the logistics of moving meant standing up and walking. Her limbs quivered, weak. She wavered then pushed up. 

She felt that same sense of vertigo one got when they jumped up in a elevator going down. The room span and she had to steady herself against the nearest wall to remain vertical.

Gradually, the world came into focus. She was in a room, a white room. There was a pallet on the floor and she wore a medical gown.

_An accident?_

She gargled deep in her throat and weakly called out, “Help?” Almost no sound emerged. The word was a breath of dry air.

She staggered in a half circle, bare soles of her feet padding on the floor, and then pressed her back to the wall she'd braced herself against, swallowing reflexively, throat working hard. Another word floated up in her mind, her mouth formed its shape with difficulty, “Hello?”

She focused on her ears, the way he had taught her. She tilted her one ear up and cupped a hand around it. She couldn't hear anything. Only the nothing of an empty room: the tinny buzz of air conditioning and the electric ring of the lights above. 

“Please… I…” Her strangled whisper petered off into rasping coughs. She bowed over, then dropped to her knees again.

“Please,” she wheezed on the floor. She surrendered to limp tears. They slipped down her face and splashed on the floor. 

 _Logan I_ … she trailed off in her mind.

***

 

In the beginning, she took pains to try and remember as much as she could. She was the total sum of her parts, made up of her memories, and every recollection seemed important. In the solitary room, she replayed over various things. Tastes. Smells. A quick smile. She comforted herself by talking to the walls, repeating conversations and travelling through the landscapes of her past. She was sat outside, recalling a sunset over the school when they came and fetched her. They placed her hands on a child no more than five years old and nothing happened.

She wished she could pick it up and hold it. 

They pointed a gun at her forehead and she backed away.

She yelled though. Shouted and demanded to know what they wanted with her. She was angry. Fierce. The men gripped her arms, her bare skin, once so deadly, and forced her down onto a table. She shook the hands off and dropped two of them but the third tripped her, abused the power he had over her weakened, starved body and forced her down, cutting off her airway to get her to submit. They strapped her arms, buckled in her feet, then made her shout as straight into the bone the one with the clipped accent inserted the thick hypodermic. The plunger sank and her veins erupted. She screamed.

Back alone, she repeated  _remember... remember who you are_. Tears in her eyes, she limped in circuits around her cell, talking to her memories, not realising that she'd begun to picture the people she spoke to not on the outside, but in here with her. Consolidating them with this place. Hallucinations took hold as something else shifted within her. She mumbled confused to the people inside her.The ones she'd killed laughed at her. The ones she'd failed to save accused her. The ones she'd ran from shook their heads.

They made her touch the child again. A mutant with latent abilities, she understood now, as skin rippled.

The child mewled into silence.

***

 

Time bled limitlessly on, horror came like the tests they performed upon her, in waves, her passing through fear and agony like they were solid things—the membranes of a shell—twisting around, each chamber larger and more awful than the last, on and on. She suffered the death of who she had been by a thousand cuts, was carved back into living marble on the operating table. They mined some of her organs. They quarried bone marrow. They dug through her head, asking her questions about the ghosts in there. The only reality became the moment and the past a whispering fog. Each tomorrow was a known threat she was defenceless against. She retained enough knowledge about trauma to understand that she was now more than passively suicidal: she wanted to die.

***

 

After a test burst of thermal radiation, where they blistered her skin through to the hypo-dermis and nerve tissue, they waited for her to reach the point of death before bringing in a girl she'd never seen before for her to touch. Something in the woman's crumpled head, so full of broken mirrors, stirred at the child's flat feral state. Her skinless forehead twitched faintly, then her heart thudded. The child was furious, a fury older than her years, embers in an alpine forest fire that stayed hidden, then seized on the nearest kindling doubling back on the unwary. The woman speculated if the child would kill her, but instead the child's eyes rolled up and she crumpled to the floor, away from the woman's hand bound to the table. The healing came on quickly and smoothed out the woman's features, rapidly turning black and red into pale skin. It went deeper, sinking through bone into her brain.

Synapses, pathways connecting cells, fired.

_Snow. Jerky. Gasoline._

Her lips lifted into a sardonic curve.

The orderly roughly picked up the unconscious girl and dragged her out.

***

 

More time passed, and the woman became less interesting to them as they tested their growing toys. Her mind, physically healed, fashioned to rework the map of her existence. She sat for hours, focusing on just her breath. She also no longer asked for death, but instead crouched near the door and listened out for comments by the orderlies and for what she now discerned was the distant screams of childish voices wheeled back and forth past her door. The smells of blood and acidic fear always accompanied the return journey.

All of the individuals inside her railed at the images she knew were all too real; the scars of them palpable, set into her own skin. There was no map as big as the country it represented and no fury as pure as his. She pictured claws erupting. Soon others joined in, ice sparkling; metal formed into a viper, ready to strike... But she could do nothing, inert, locked behind a door.

***

 

After failing to take one of them down when they entered to feed her, they starved her for a week then filled her room with nitrous oxide. She laughed madly as she went down then fused into silence in the observation room where once more the woman was fixed immobile on the central table. In an offhanded way, the main doctor asked an assistant if the woman had become depressive -  _doesn't she usually rave?_ The woman kept the dialogue inside, readying herself for agony but didn't blink when he simply injected her bicep with something and nothing hurt.

Shortly after, they wheeled the woman into a treatment room to find three children already trussed up, similar to how she was, only with their hands stretched out.

The doctor announced, "This worked in a trial, let's check it in reality shall we?"

The orderlies machinated for the children to touch her all at the same time. Abilities swirled within her and the woman knew all of them intimately as if they'd grown under her own breasts. The littlest boy, a dreamer, shut down; the grief of the scores of people within the woman, all those possible deaths, overwhelmed his nascent thinking and neuron cells that were still in the process of forming, froze. His panic-stricken brain went on hyper alert, bypassed his cerebral cortex, straight into the primitive where his power turned upon him. His hand locked against her stomach, the woman screamed as this power then slipped from him into her, along with his life force. The last thing the boy witnessed, not really conceptualising, but experiencing terror, was handmade graves... death and more death, his own included.

The woman didn't pass out, couldn't, not as full as she was with healing, precognition, and flames. They spread and turned the room to ash. Restraint chairs were pushed apart. Two of the orderlies didn't make it but the doctor watched from behind the glass with a frown. Throughout it all, the healing girl remained silent, carbonised, hardened like a diamond, watching the woman until oxygen was sucked from the room and the fire extinguished.

On the way back to her cell, the enraged woman tried charging the muscled orderlies once more and was sliced across the orbital bone, then darted for her effort. Supposedly Democritus blinded himself to think. Gloucester only saw the truth after his eyes were plucked out. As she went down, she realised she couldn't do this alone. She needed help. Real help.

***

 

Light filled hours, days, months perhaps, came and went. Food in the door. Shit filled buckets out. Fate being a petty thing, the woman was asleep when they next came and given a muscle relaxant before she knew it. They injected her significantly again and this time, only wheeled one child in. Their skin met: a telepath. He reached his fingers out to her calling her silently by her name with delight, and before he convulsed, he passed over his power. The woman hated herself for his hope. The doctors waited, the boy slumped and the woman felt tears slip down her face, feeling powerless against her power. Then she read the doctor's mind. She understood what had been done.

The boys lungs expanded slowly. His heart beating sounded like footsteps walking away.

The woman galvanised herself and turned it around. Instead of taking in, she gave out. Instead of being conquered, charged.

Drawn-out thuds gained pace.

The woman gave a first gasp of pleasure as she never had from the touch of another.

The boy stirred and woke up. Hope still lurked there in his eyes. She empathised that he needed a saviour. He sent her an image. It was a page from a comic book. In it, her white and dark hair flared. Her body stood proud.

The woman looked and witnessed her appearance in the glass behind which, the doctor sat. Her body was skeletal. Face scarred, an eye ruptured. Her hair was seared off at different lengths, away from her head. Distinctly, a white tuft at the front stood up intractable.

The woman remembered those books and recalled a very distinct page she'd smiled fondly at years ago. Calm trickled into her until her mind was filled with it. An image built in her head to a forensic level. A page with co-ordinates; a place of peace. She used the boy's power to shield her mind, and then with acuity, reach out. She found a nurse secreted in a corner, filming a clandestine video of the healing girl chained up, prone on the floor. No child was born a killer. It was the things that adults did that made them so. The nurse was horrified. She cared.

The woman had found her help.

To the boy, girl, and nurse, the woman imparted an image of _Eden_. Still shielded, she sent the healing girl another image of hope. It was an emotionally charged scene of coming back to life because another had been willing to sacrifice everything to save her.

The nurse left work that night and scoured to find the image she had been sent. Her guilt over not having done something before had been cleared by the simple message also sent into her head:  _it's not what you've done. It's what you're gonna do._ The nurse had faith and believed all creations were a gift from God. The boy and girl were not a deviation. They had a place and she would help them and their brothers and sisters get there for she loved them.

The broken woman only believed in one thing. Thinking of the book, she reflected, maybe it was all the same if it worked.

***

 

When the alarms sounded, and she heard through the wall some of the children die, the woman wondered if she'd made a mistake filling their heads with a lie. She'd hoped to give them the strength to go on. To grow and not give up like she almost had. She wanted that hope for them because she knew there could be a place in the world for them, a place where people understood and they could be safe. She felt like the worst kind of prophet in that moment, as betrayed as some of the students had appeared when she'd walked the halls of the school able to touch and yet was suddenly a bridge apart in wanting to be closer.

The alarms sounded on and on. There was gunfire and screams. The woman put every hope and wish into them escaping. Guards came into her room to check if she was secured and she made them pay. She got to the communications room and held it for as long as possible. Shots splattered into the room and in a spray across where she stood. Bullets ripped through her thigh, her abdomen, her clavicle, and she went down hard. Blood pooled from her on the floor below her and she panted, eyes fixed on the doctor as blackness whorled around her head. At least if she died, it wouldn't be without purpose.

The doctor noticed her and his eyes narrowed. He lifted a device to his ear and spoke into it. “Bring the X-24.”

At the shape that appeared in the door, for one heart stopping moment, the woman believed herself to be saved. She reached a hand out. It quivered. He marched in and bent down. His hand snaked around her neck and squeezed, lifting her up and over his head.

Healing poured into her and her wounds scabbed over as her heart sped, driven as only the threat of death could encourage, to pulse harder and faster, in defiance of the lack of oxygen coming from her lungs. Confusion then clarity dawned on the woman. She willed her power into the thing that held her, pulling and pulling. The hand on her throat tightened and it roared and then it dropped her.

She huddled in on herself, taking irregular breaths.

“Interesting,” the doctor commented. He nudged his head to one of the other people that gathered behind him and a sharp point hit the woman in the leg. As she slipped into unconsciousness, she heard him add, “More work to be done there.”

When she awoke, it was to explore the void in her mind that was the presence of the creature that had touched her. She didn't hate it nor even pity it. It had a brain akin to that of a baby, or a half-coded computer, but one with a deliberate bug set into its program. It had been influenced, given commands, and all that coercion had done was induce aggression. There were abnormalities in it now. The creature didn't know how to regulate or perceive emotion. The doctor had created lapses in it's frontal cortex, inhibiting actions taken on empathy. The only impulses it could process were violence and barbarity.

Its abnormalities sat in the back of her mind queasily.

It felt so different from  _his_  brain, from the girl's. The woman knew how some behaviours were inherited, but when she touched them, all she'd felt was how that wildness was pure in its desire to protect as it was to hurt. Savage acts did sometimes soothe them, but they nulled aggression in other ways too. With care. Love. They knew how to calm themselves without hurting themselves or others... Sometimes anyway, the woman half smiled.

Her fingers traced a crack in the wall of her cell.

From the creature that had choked her, she held onto more than a psychic impression. Its hostile mind a hollow in her head, vestiges of its regenerative power lurked in her blood. The woman correctly deduced that perhaps along with the ability to control her power, they'd extended how long she could manipulate another's gift. The creature might not know terror or safety, but she did. She absorbed its addiction to violence and punched that crack in the wall with a purpose more than wanton destruction. She punched it again and again, hand splitting apart and healing.

***

 

Events played out before she could intervene or assist but she followed. It felt like her heart pulled her as much as her head. She took a risk for compassion, and held Caliban's hand as he died. He gave her his gift with love. Later, by the roadside, she grieved to see the small mound and withered body within; one so at odds with the intellect it had controlled. She couldn't heal, but she could still absorb.

The Professor walked in the cloister of her mind and welcomed her with kind eyes. He settled there easily; the man always having been a voice of one and many. They talked and she pursued.

She finally came to another grave. Smoke from the battle still drifted on the air. Maybe it was too late and maybe it wasn't. Sobbing, she dragged rocks away from the surface, digging below the shadow on the 'X'. Down and down, until she came to flesh. In repose, he looked at peace. A part of her was loathed to disturb him. The Professor encouraged her to try...  _He was born running. He's got something to run to._

Maybe it was morally flawed, but it was also true. He did have something to live for.

Reaching out slowly, she placed a hand to the body's neck. Like the Professor, enough lingered neurochemically and her skin rippled. She drew him in cognitively. Welcomed him gently. She drew him deep, soothing him as she would a shy animal.

 _Quickly now. He can't live in some mystical part of your mind like me,_ the Professor sent.

He had been at peace, he told her once inside. She slumped.  _It's alright_ , he added. She gave him a choice...

Approaching the X-24, Rogue, the Professor and Logan watched it heal. It twitched.

 _Improvements made there then, too_ , he grunted in her mind. He cocked a phantom mischievous eyebrow.

 _The diminished brain functioning and diminished control, might be a problem,_  the other voice in her replied.

_Charles, as you know, I've always had a bad brain._

_A brain? Really?_

_Funny..._

The death-picture the dreamer boy had experienced before he went, the image of those two graves, had seemed indelible to Marie then. When Logan opened his eyes and looked at her, his face lit. The woman smiled to herself sadly. There were parts of her that would always be broken.

“Hey kid.”

His large hand took hers and she willed nothing to happen. She hated where that ability had come from. But maybe... maybe, anything was possible.

"Let's go."

 

 


End file.
